In the last decade, legislation and the advent of Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) have revolutionized the communication industry with new technologies, business models, and service providers. Software and commodity hardware now provide an alternative to expensive carrier equipment. One can implement extensible call switching and voice application logic in Open source software applications, such as Asterisk and FreeSwitch. These new application stacks, however, usher in new complexities and challenges, requiring new skill sets to deploy, develop, and maintain. Deploying telephony services requires knowledge of voice networking and codecs, hardware or services to bridge servers to the public phone infrastructure, capital investment in hardware, and ongoing collocation of that hardware. These burdens are a mere prerequisite to developing the actual application, which requires developers to train in new languages, tools, and development environments. Even telephony applications that currently try to leverage a model more similar to web-development such as Voice Extensible Markup Language (VoiceXML), require the dedication to learn a new language and understand telephony interaction. Ongoing operation and maintenance of these services requires teams to adopt new analysis tools, performance metrics, and debugging methodologies. Developing even the simplest of voice services (such as a so-called “phone tree”) requires significant upfront and ongoing investment in specialized infrastructure, skills, and operations.
In similar manner to how multimedia has impacted the advance of the Internet, interacting with media through telephony services is also becoming more important for telephony applications. However, media consumption through an internet browser and a telephony device are completely different experiences, each having different user expectations. Unlike websites, where users have been conditioned for loading times and processing time, phone users expect real-time results and often view processing delays as application annoyances. Internet media is inherently multimedia: a combination of text, images, video, audio, and other forms of multimedia. Telephony devices are limited in the format of media consumable by a user. In the case of a typical phone, audio with 8-bit PCM mono with 8 kHz bandwidth format is the native form. Tremendous amounts of processing must be performed by telephony applications to convert from internet media to telephony compatible media. The processing increases infrastructure costs, slows down the responsiveness of a telephony application, and overall, limits the possibilities of telephony applications. The inefficiency of media processing impacts not only one telephony application but all applications operating on a system. Thus, there is a need in the telephony field to create a new and useful system and method for processing media requests during telephony sessions. This invention provides such a new and useful system and method.